Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to offer support to my colleague from Windsor West who has put forward this bill.
This gives me a chance to take a trip down memory lane for the next few minutes. A lot of this is about dealerships doing work versus work being done outside the dealership network but still in the repair part of the economy.
Back in the day, a lot of years ago now, I worked at such a place, for International Harvester. It was a truck centre where we sold and repaired international trucks, not the farm equipment but the trucks. I was there for about 11 years before I was elected to Hamilton city council. I can speak with some authority in terms of the way it was and relate that to where things are going now. Back then there was a level playing field.
Let us keep in mind that at its core the member for Windsor West is trying to bring in a fair, rules-based system that treats everybody the same. Back in the day when I was on the shop floor, that is the way it was. There was no advanced technology. We were in the early stages of that when I left, which would have been in the mid-1980s. There was a level playing field. Nobody held any secrets. Nobody had any special tools that they were not giving to others. Software was not even in the vocabulary. Everyone had to compete on the same basis.
Much like today, all the warranty work was done at our shop.That was probably the biggest part of our work, as well as work on the big fleets that were willing to pay for the very best mechanics, and I might say, parts people. They did not want any problems. They wanted things to go as smoothly as possible. A corporation at that level wants things to go smoothly. Working with a dealership with a major infrastructure attached to the mother corporation was a great way to go.
There were a lot of brokers and smaller trucking firms that would do their own work, or have it done by an offshoot of their company, or by someone such as a brother-in-law who ran a local garage, or Bill down on the corner who had been there for 30 years and treated everyone like family so people wanted to go there. People were able to save a few bucks, but they were not freebies or giveaways.
That was their choice, and that is the issue. To allow consumers and other after market repair businesses access to this material, the tools and the information takes us back to where we were before, which was that everybody was equal. It was business preference, productivity and efficiency that decided where people went, not whether or not they had the secret code.
They do not allow it in the United States, interestingly. It is done under the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Why? Obviously the environment is so crucial now, or at least we have now woken up to how crucial it is. The last thing we want to do is take cars that are being designed to do less damage to the environment and repair them in a way that suddenly has them polluting. It does not make sense.
That seems to be what the EPA in the U.S. has said. The U.S. has that system. Why do we not? It denies consumers a choice. It is not as productive. It increases costs through lack of choice. It creates unfairness. Everyone attached to the automotive industry ought to be thanking the member for Windsor West for this bill.
I can appreciate there are some employees, as I was, who see the possibility that their work is going to go somewhere else, and they are fighting to retain it. Fair enough. That is the union's job. However, my experience was that allowing others to do the same work or at least to compete did not detract from that because we had so much extra to offer.
Other communities may argue, but I am sure the member for Windsor West would be proud to say he is from the automotive capital of Canada. We will give him that for the purposes of this bill. Let us remember that he represents a lot of the workers who are trying to protect the work they have in the current system. It would have been very easy for the member to stand in the tall grass on something like this if somebody else had brought it forward. Not only did he not do that, he was the one who brought it forward. He is doing it because he knows it is in the best interests of Canadians and he believes it is not going to do any damage to jobs that exist.
All it does is provide an unfair competitive advantage, almost a monopoly on some work by virtue of keeping secrets, which are not allowed to be kept in the country that is our biggest trading partner, the United States of America. The U.S. understands that Toyota, Honda and others ought not to be able to send their cars here and keep the secrets back home. That ought to apply whether it is a domestic or foreign automotive producer.
That is what this is about at its core. Again, it is about choice. It is about fairness. It is about making sure that Canadians have an opportunity to decide for themselves where they want to spend their money and where they want to get their vehicles repaired.
In bringing in Bill C-273, the member for Windsor West, in a large way, is doing every consumer in Canada a huge favour by removing an unfairness, an imbalance that has now been created that did not exist before. It is part of going through the transition ultimately into the new digital economy. We need to keep an eye on it from a legislative point of view to ensure that these new technologies do not create an inherent unfairness. This is one of those times.
When the member for Windsor West saw what was happening and heard from his constituents and the tens of thousands of small automotive repair shops, 95% Canadian owned, all employing local people, he investigated and, as I said, in the face of a possibility of political backlash, he had the courage to bring it forward just because it is the right thing to do.
Many issues we deal with here are of utmost importance, and consumer protection is one of the most important. That is really what this is. It is not life and death. None of our kids are going to be facing critical health issues because of this. There is no pandemic attached to the bill, or those kinds of worries. However, protecting consumers is an important part of a legislative body's duty in a mature democracy. That is what this bill does.
I want to thank my colleague from Windsor West for bringing this bill forward and making things better for the Canadian people. I can only hope that the vast majority of parliamentarians will agree and at least allow us to get the bill to committee. Let us bring in the players and have a look at it. At the very least, let us do that.
I urge members to support this bill, at least at second reading, so we can look at it further.